Readers of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch will find much open
engagement of Nabokov--especially Despair, The Real Life
of Sebastian Knight, and "The Vane Sisters" (and/or the
lecture on Proust) some reverberations of Lolita,
perhaps Pale Fire and "La Veneziana," along with a
great deal of Dostoevsky (esp. The Idiot and Crime and
Punishment), Tolstoy and Pushkin as well, much Proust, and I'm
sure many other things I haven't noticed. And it grapples with
those "cursed questions": truth, reality, loss, memory, the purpose
of suffering, love, the significance or essence of art.
One of the novel's more insistent references [NO SPOILER FOLLOWS!]
involves two or three repetitions of the phrase "rainbow edge,"
one-and-a-half of which occur in the last few paragraphs, and this
set me thinking and searching. I had thought this was straight from
RLSK, but my checking corrected me--Gennady
Barabtarlo's article reminded me that it appears in the
lecture on Proust ), and Maurice Couturier's article
pointed out that the same phrase was suggested as an
alternate title for Conclusive Evidence (Selected Letters,
118-9), while a Google Books search led me to Linda Wagner-Martin's
article* quoting the same phrase from "The Vane Sisters," written in
1951 prior to the letter regarding Conclusive Evidence. In
RLSK, "Prismatic Edge" is the closest Sebastian comes to this
phrase, as an alternative to his "Prismatic Bezel." (See also Boyd,
American Years, 192).
The phrase itself appears to be little-used in the language; it
appears in Google Books in a few publications from the late 19th
century (but not in Project Gutenberg). But it also appears in the
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 10
(1894), p. 412, in a "Report on the Census of Hallucinations,"
Appendix E. This is the source for Nabokov's invocation of the
term in "The Vane Sisters":
"Vane Sisters": "Sybil's personality, she said, had a
rainbow edge as if a little out of focus." (Stories, 625)
PSPR: "(2) A man on a velocipede traveling rapidly from left to
right; a peculiarity of this man was that he always appeared with
a 'rainbow edge,' as if a little out of focus."
Nothing surprising here, though it makes me wonder whether in
reading the SPR work Nabokov was reminded of his own "prismatic
edge" or, what would be surprising, if he was already
reading PSPR before he wrote RLSK, in Paris. It is
possible--I have not checked extensively--that William James quotes
this very anecdote in something else Nabokov might have read well
before the late '30s. Nothing turns up on a quick search.
Stephen Blackwell
*Wagner-Martin, Linda, “The Vane Sisters” and Nabokov’s “Subtle and
Loving”
Readers, in: Torpid Smoke: The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, ed. S.
G. Kellman
and I. Malin, Amsterdam, 2000, pp. 229—244; also in Value &
Vision In American Literature: Essays In Honor Of Ray Lewis White,
Joseph Candido (editor), 47-63